Re: Debian, Iceweasle, Firefox!
On Saturday 27 January 2007 16:31, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 27, 2007 at 03:52:51PM -0500, Angelo Bertolli wrote:
> > I'm not clear on why Firefox couldn't be put in non-free though.
> > (I just figured it was for upgrades.)
>
> Probably because of portability. I don't think mozilla provides
> official binaries for s390 and probably hppa and some of the other
> less common architectures that Debian supports. The means that
> Debian must choose to alienate some of its users in order to favor
> the "official" Mozilla packages.
>
> I suppose that they could do something like with rar (or is it
> unrar), where Debian has both free and non-free versions. There
> could be iceweasel and firefox-nonfree, with firefox-nonfree being
> unsupported from a security standpoint, but still carrying the
> official name and artwork.
>
> Personally, security support is more important to me than pretty
> artwork.
I agree.
I think the Mozilla people have their heads up their butts on this one,
though. I can understand wanting to preserve the name and logo of your
work, but as F/OSS developers, they are certainly aware of issues like
this and it might be wise, from their point of view, to set up the make
file so it would produce either binaries with their logos and names or
ones without "generic" logos and names (and, of course, without the
non-free stuff).
Out of curiosity, I remember when OpenOffice went OSS, there were
features that were missing until they could be replaced with OSS
versions. Are there plans to eventually replace some features in
Iceweasel with open source versions that could eventually find their
way into the Firefox source tree -- eventually replacing all the
non-free features? And is any functionality actually lost in Iceweasel
that one would notice in Firefox?
Hal
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